Motivations are the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way like “escape can be a strong motivation for travel”. So, learning a language is mainly motivated for what you see, in your current situation, learning English could do. So, if travel is an escape, learning a new language is a way of aiding that escape.

Talking about escape, I saw a movie “A Twelve Year Night” a true story, culled from the real-life experiences of the three featured prisoners, who at the time of their capture were members of Uruguay’s radical, trade union-affiliated Tupamaros movement, which was quashed during the military’s coup. 

With the success of the junta, a handful of Tupamaros was spirited away from their prison cells in 1973 and subjected to the “kind of targeted, extended isolation that more resembled a hostage scenario by vengeful overseers than a law-dictated sentence”. After democracy returned to Uruguay, one of the men, soft-spoken guerrilla José Mujica, who went by “Pepe,” would go on to become Uruguay’s president from 2010 to 2015.

Keep Up Hope

The thing that attracted me to this movie is the way the three prisoners were kept in separate cells and prohibited to speak to each other. They were determined men and refused to be “silenced”; thus they found a way to communicate by tapping signals to one another using the Morse code. 

The men’s captors’ best weapon was solitary confinement and the disorienting assault to their sense of time and self by noncommunication. The motivation to resist fear and despair made these men devise this plan and keep at it. Knowing that another person is out there, listening and responding, kept up their hope that help and freedom will soon come.

Speak Freely

Putting this men’s incarceration for 12 years in the right perspective, what can be more motivating than having the means of escape – the use of the English language? Freedom is essential for men to enjoy life and deprivation of the right to communicate is like death itself.

Can you think of any better motivation than learning English to enjoy the freedom of speech? Until you lose the privilege of speaking your mind out, you cannot appreciate free speech.

Think of a Better Life

The ability to speak English well and use it in your line of job opens many opportunities. Many who have only gone through high school (due to financial limitations) soon got themselves lucrative high positions in Call Center jobs. A Call Center is a form of BPO that deals with inbound and outbound calls providing sales, customer service, technical support, telemarketing, & phone surveys for their clients. With the right diction, you can pass off yourself as a native American. 

Thus, the skill of speaking good English opens up the door where in many cases, they are shut close without the corresponding college degree like engineering, degree-based jobs, and highly technical positions. 

Choose A Career

Fluency in English is a boon for one who is reared in a country where the majority of the population are employed in outsourced jobs. You might know a few basic English words you’ve learned locally from grade school and secondary school but the big difference in gaining fluency is the constancy of use and practice. 

Take a pick of the outsourced jobs or the so-called call center jobs, where you might need the basic skill of speaking and understanding English. Some of these outsourced jobs are Data Entry, Technical Support, Customer Service, Accounting, and Writing.

Feed Your Writer Self

Two aspects of writing that are often outsourced are copywriting and proofreading. While companies may not have the budget needed to hire a professional writer, they still want their advertising and marketing copy written in an attractive and compelling manner. Therefore, they outsource the job to freelance writers, who come in on a contractual basis to complete individual projects on a need-to-write basis. 

In the movie, Ruso’s beneficial arrangement with a sergeant to ghost-write his love letters was like a flash of light in a dark cave. So, here is where writing is put to good use during evil times.

Freedom!

There may be more reasons to keep learning English, but you need only to remember this main thing, in many countries around the globe, not everyone has this freedom to learn, to choose, and to pursue their dreams. So, if you are somewhere where you can get into the Internet and search freely, here’s a place you can go for help in learning English.
The message of the movie “A Twelve Year Night” is that sometimes a human simply withstands what it’s subjected to, and that’s enough to rivet us. You need no other big motivation but just to keep the primary expression of self that makes you human – the freedom of speech.